Force Play
by Amelia Island
Summary: Each clandestine meeting provokes another, and every step forward drives the inexplicable force mounting between them. Like gravity, they can't escape its pull. Post-TLJ. (Reylo)
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Many of my fics began life as play-by-post roleplays and this one is no exception. That's why we'll be in Kylo's head for the first three chapters or so before I switch it up to Rey. I'm generally a Kylo player!_

_In addition to the obvious pun, a "force play" in baseball is a move that compels the runner to advance to the next base. Review to subscribe to more sports facts._

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**I**

He felt it when Skywalker passed. Gone, but never really _gone,_ as his former master had promised that day they squared off on the salt-encrusted soil of Crait. The red mineral earth had seemed like a greater promise to Kylo then, a promise of bloodshed, but in the end it was thwarted. Skywalker was gone, but not by his hand. Skywalker was _not_ gone, and it was in blanket defiance of his mission. Luke existed still as his father did.

Both lived on in his blood.

During the day he was Supreme Leader. He assumed no physical throne. The chair on the _Supremacy_ had been destroyed, and while Kylo had once imagined himself seated there (and these fantasies were no stranger to Snoke's manipulations, he now knew), no chair could hold him. He paced the halls of the _Finalizer_ the same as he always had, a motive, sweeping shadow that chased everything else back into scurrying obscurity. Normally he preferred to be avoided, but now it grated. Now, the pensive fear that surrounded him at all hours incensed him. He knew they were all unequal to him, but where was the competency? And why did the growing loneliness feast on him?

He knew _why._ But he pushed the thought, the memory, of an extended hand—a hushed plea—from his mind. There could only be one Supreme Leader. The fact that, in a moment of weakness, he had been willing to abolish the title and begin anew was of no consequence now.

Not a lot had changed. Not _enough_ had changed. The Resistance thinned, and became ever-more elusive as a result. Hux publicly trumpeted a complete misbelief in their mission, but Kylo could see his heart. He knew the general harbored a grudge against the uprising comparable to his own, and that Hux also wanted them wiped from the face of the galaxy. All other matters within the First Order still turned like well-oiled machinery. It should shake him to know that the loss of Supreme Leader Snoke, the man he had exalted above all others living, could come as no great consequence, but he put it from his mind. Where one fell, another rose.

And Kylo was determined to remain. He was determined to make an impact. Even if he had to do it alone.

But he was rarely, truly alone. _She_ was still with him, an intrusive thought, a persistent sighting in rippling gray-green. He tried his best to ignore her, to render her as insignificant as a desert mirage.

But it was difficult to dismiss the quarterstaff suddenly whistling through the air toward him. Kylo didn't so much as flinch as Rey, at the last second, deliberately restrained herself from delivering what would have been a punishing blow; the tip of her staff hovered just above his racing pulse point.

"Ben."

"Rey."

He wanted to assign her _scavenger_, to regress their relationship with a single isolating word, but he found that he could not—any more than he could, in that moment, summon all his loathing for his given name and refuse to answer to it. His lidded gaze slid sideways and registered the staff as she withdrew it from the hollow of his throat. Even now, he couldn't help wondering how substantial their connection was. He had not reached for her since that ill-fated night.

"Alone as always," he surmised. His name would not have crossed her lips if she had company. "For someone so willing to die with the Resistance, you spend a good deal of time avoiding the friends you have chosen."

"I'm training to defend them," Rey replied. She manipulated her staff easily, whirling it once like the rotor of a ship before retiring it to her side. "And since I don't want to risk harming any of those friends by accident, I've gone away from them."

"You have so little self-control?" Kylo mused. "Must be _liberating."_

Durasteel swung at him like a reckoning.

Kylo struck out with his hand before he knew what she was about—not to catch her staff, but to Force it to a standstill mid-sweep through the air. She dared to attack _him?_ What was she thinking, in that now-impenetrable brain of hers? He had been inside it so many times before, and its mysteries only left him with more unanswered questions...

But then he realized what Rey was doing, and released his psychic hold. The weight of her staff dropped into his open palm with a muted _thunk._ It rested, solidly nestled, in his glove.

Interesting.

"For someone who boasted of destroying me, you've certainly been taking your sweet time." Rey's eyes flashed. "Or have you been busy?"

She was testing more than just the physical limits of their connection. Kylo's fingers curled around the staff, before he repelled it back to her. "You mistake me for not having patience," he said as he circled her. One of Rey's eyebrows lifted incredulously at this statement, but if there was irony in the air, he personally did not taste it. His stance wasn't offensive—yet—but there was a distinct prowl to his step now, a cautious overture. He wore no cape or cowl; only his charcoal-black padded armor. He hadn't even had time to break a mid-morning sweat in his own training before the connection between them yanked his consciousness across space-time to her.

Around Kylo, the view was less expansive, although impressive in a different way. His mere presence had emptied the training room; out of fear, certainly, but also out of the widely-held knowledge that he preferred not to be disturbed. This preference had been tested before by a cocksure young officer looking to ingratiate himself with the knight. This test had been proctored once and never again.

"Your staff won't last a minute against me." It was arrogant, mocking, but there was also the spark of curiosity. What would she do if this was a real encounter? Appeal to his sportsmanship?

Would he let her?

The girl's staff came down and put a halt to his imposing circuit. Kylo dropped his eyes simultaneous to raising his own eyebrow. Durasteel depressed the fabric of his vest, and Rey's hands applied the pressure. It was a bold overture, if a crude one. It was for those reasons that it had come unexpectedly. He lifted his gaze, a lock of sable hair dangling across one keen eye. His expression never changed; although, for a moment, it almost appeared as if his mouth twitched toward a half-smile...

But any appreciation he might have felt for Rey's pluck vanished the moment Kylo realized he could no longer move. The staff came down, but his progress was arrested; his body gave an infinitesimal jerk as he tried to advance it. He stared at her, equal parts bewildered and infuriated. A split second later, he wrenched his legs again.

Nothing.

"Maybe I wouldn't need my staff." Rey's lips gave a delightfully impetuous tug.

"…. arrogant," he commended her finally. "As you were the last time we met." He remembered the _Falcon_ winging out of the atmosphere on Crait in a blaze of laserfire, and how hot rage had consumed him at the insubordinate display. _So like Han Solo,_ although he would die in a Force-hold before he ever told her.

It wasn't the true 'last time' they had met, of course. But the victorious rewrote history, and Kylo wasn't excepting theirs. Now, as Rey appropriated his circling with a confident smile, he let his gaze drop. He focused. He found the threads of her will whispering along his catatonic limbs, and he repulsed them with a single, brutal shove; he rolled his shoulders, and cracked his neck. Slow. Unconcerned. At his side, his thumb slid along his hilt in a barely perceptible movement and dialed down the setting. Something he had never done before.

Then he whirled. His lightsaber engaged; he let it revolve in his hand, giving Rey an advantageous moment to realize what was coming, before he threw his shoulder forward and brought it down in a vengeful arc.

It was a dance between them. It hadn't always been. Kylo still recalled her awakening in the snowy, doomed wilderness of _Starkiller_—how she had risen to meet him after he struck the traitor down, and how he had met his equal there almost for the first time. He had feared the surgence of her power in the interrogation chamber, but he had never wavered in their battle. Every sizzling blow had seemed fated, every parry preordained. He had accepted his defeat then gracelessly; it had haunted him, just like the scar. The girl.

"You and I seem to remember our last meeting differently." He watched the red fire flare in her eyes, watched the hair she now wore free of constraint spin around her neck as she maneuvered through his attack unharmed. Kylo let his blade wheel in his hand once more as he stepped back.

"It's how I prefer to remember you." Dangerous words, but his blood was pumping, and Rey was once more within his reach. She was a galaxy away, but she had already proven that contact was possible, and more, with her Force display.

He watched as, with an elegant shrug, Rey shifted out of her vest. A peculiar tightness in his throat stemmed the flow of words. He assumed too late that it had been a distraction tactic, because suddenly Rey's staff impacted, _again,_ delivering a glancing blow to his side. Kylo struck a diagonal with his saber, but it cleaved empty air as she withdrew. Too slow. Unguarded.

Their eyes met. He was better served by circling once more, mirroring her, his posture less erect. When she came for him this time, he was ready. Her elbow winged through the air, and he seized the arm mid-swing. His fingers wrapped around her bicep as he yanked her close.

"It's only a matter of time before the First Order hunts the Resistance down." His whisper stirred a strand of hair hanging in Rey's face. "And before _I_ find _you."_ Releasing her then would have been the perfect, careless punctuation, but he couldn't bear to let her slip through his fingers. Not just yet. His eyes drifted to her lips, wondering how they might next defy him. "What will you do when I come for you? When I set fire to every last soul standing in my way? You'll have to do better than this."

Rey gasped, and unexpected heat flooded through him at the outburst of breath. It was a molten rush he had no name for. Was she surprised, exerted? Outraged? "I'll do what I have to." She didn't pull to try and gain freedom. It's as if her resistance would be admitting he held her at all. "That's what you want. It's what you've always wanted."

The question of what he wanted was a complicated one. The maelstrom still raged within him, the constant birth of feeling and the forced destruction of it; and the phoenix rose, again and again, spreading its wings, demanding deliverance, only to be snuffed out by a clenching of his will.

Some days, it was all too clear what he wanted.

But reflection and clarity might just as easily be called on to remind him of his place in this narrative. _And_ of his promise, made a lifetime ago to an old man who had made a crust of salt his last stand: _I'll destroy her._ Had he meant it? Were his words then only posture, or was his conflict and confusion since the real deceit, a trick of the Light?

"You have no idea what it is I want." His eyes flickered between hers as his face devolved into an expressionless mask. He would not let her see past it. Rey would have likely struggled to comprehend what lay within him, anyway, considering Kylo was so often a stranger to himself these days. What motives could she sense when he didn't know them himself?

"And what is it you want, Rey?" A rough shove propelled her from him as if he had to force the uncoupling. Like it was too natural to be close to her. "You, who searched so long for answers you had locked away. Have you finally found the family you sought? The Resistance must feel a poor consolation."

He circled as he egged her on.

"You want power—because no matter how much of it you amass, you still feel weak. But it will never be enough. And you will _always _feel powerless." She went right for the quick of him as he had for her, as if she could peer inside every desolate chamber of his heart and know the depth of his deficiency. She could—through the Force, she could—but she didn't need any preternatural ability to recognize him. Because though she may refute it with the vehemence of a true nemesis, she was the _same._ "You want a New Order," she concluded.

_Order_ would have been a welcome change to the tumult that upheaved every sense with which he experienced the galaxy since birth. First Skywalker had promised him better understanding, then Snoke. Neither had delivered, and now Kylo was adrift and alone and more twisted-up inside than ever. Every time he beheld her, he was further estranged from real understanding. It would be better for all involved, he thought, if their connection withered on its conduit; if they devoted themselves to the causes they had chosen and played no more in this limbo.

But Rey wasn't playing, and neither was he. She charged him, and his blood sang at the ferocity of her expression, his excitement burning all incertitude away. _This moment_ was what he lived for, what he had escaped to, again and again, when he was young: a violence that his parents had feared, that Skywalker had sought to bank in him. And here was an excuse for it, suddenly, delivered like a gift to him by the girl who understood him better than anyone to come before her.

He caught the arc of her staff with a sweep of his saber. The plasma seemed to curse and spit against durasteel in an ancient language. Kylo forced her step sideways as he took one of his own. When they weren't on a direct collision course, they were always orbiting. There was a force stronger than gravity between them that seemed always to adhere to the same laws. "You disarmed yourself," he taunted. They disengaged, met again. He saw little of Skywalker's technique represented in her own. The observation was encouraging. He understood from their past conversations just how abysmally Luke had failed her, even if Rey would not go so far as to say it herself.

"The Skywalker lightsaber would not have been destroyed if you joined me. Instead you sought to sunder everything!" A slash backed by brute strength shoved them apart. "Even our connection." It was a guess. Kylo himself had never sought to close it. But how could Rey, in her exemplary goodness, wish to keep it open? Maybe she felt herself more a hostage to it than anything. _To me,_ he thought, and his heart quickened. It seemed the nearest he would come to possessing her again.

He unbuckled his belt, before the same hand came up and rent open one side of his vest in a careless motion. The padded material fell from his shoulders, leaving him in a long-sleeved ribbed black undershirt and gloves. "But you can't close it, so you're forced to hide it from those closest to you. What a burden it must be."

"Is that what this is to you? A burden?" Rey whirled and struck again. Never running away now; she was always running toward him. Kylo wondered if there would ever come a time when his breath didn't hitch at the sight, the way it had as he watched her relentless rushes on Snoke. There had never been any shred of grudging reverence in her, never a thought of supplication, and never so much as a modicum of self-preserving respect for the power seated on the throne before her. How Kylo had admired and envied her. How her display had riveted him, throwing all past audiences alongside Hux into a new light. He would never kneel again, to anyone, and he rested certain that neither would she.

"No," he said as he moved to meet her. "For me it is a release."

He welcomed her next telegraphed charge, but a quick feint beneath his arm was unexpected. Suddenly, his size and strength were rendered absolutely cumbersome as the slighter of them shot her staff through his elbow like a latch. Before he could retaliate, his saber disengaged, the hilt rattled, and it shot from his fingers. He knew all too well where it was summoned.

_Impudence._ And yet, irrationally, he almost wanted to laugh. There were none who would have dared Rey's tactics. Perhaps power was his real handicap, if those who existed in awe of it did not rise to their own potential to challenge his.

Kylo pinned her staff with his captured arm and gave a wrench. He felt an impact, felt a surprised gust of hot air on his neck, as he wielded her weapon against her. It became an extension of himself, and he used it to sweep her off him. She came away with his sword, and he her stave.

"This is familiar." Referring to their frequent exchanges of weaponry in the throne room, and not the staff itself. Just because the latter was unfamiliar did not mean he couldn't master it. Kylo hefted it in his right hand, spun it, easily finding its center of mass. "Red suits you." If only Skywalker had survived to see her now, cast in the scarlet fury of his saber. Kylo doubted the old man had ever expected his last, failed apprentice to be on the aggressor's side of Ren's blade.

"You better hope it won't suit you better. I could open you up and find out." Her brazen, bloodthirsty remark shocked him, but the secret, close-lipped smile that accompanied it… was she teasing him? Kylo had only ever observed her smiles from afar, at times when Rey mistakenly thought herself alone. Whenever she beheld any small wonder, some detail of that unseen environment that others took for granted—be it vibrancy, be it color, or rain—she could not always conceal her delight quickly enough to escape his attention.

"Is that an invitation?" Her staff was heavy, but not beyond his ability to wield single-handed. He twirled it again, letting it slide along his knuckles and back into his waiting palm. "You know I can take whatever I want." An echo of a long-ago conversation, but his tone was different now. There was no less degree of certitude, but the promise that ghosted beneath it was sly.

"Then come and claim it," she said.

Kylo's self-control uncurled like an opening fist. He was _reaching_ for her before he even moved a muscle to attack. He experienced Rey's surge of excitement, of indefinable _feeling,_ as if it was his own. He watched as the living blade cast her in its fevered, scarlet light.

Yes, he would come to her. He would come _for_ her.

His boot slid sideways across the slick, reflective black floor of the training room; then he lunged, sweeping the staff up over his head and rotating it. He let the momentum carry his whole body around in a whirl as he struck diagonally for her right side. He knew his own blade; the air between them was charged with his kyber crystal's agony. She could attempt to turn it on him, but the Force would reveal soon enough whether or not her efforts would be successful.

He caught her off-balance and slid behind her like a second shadow. He twisted her right arm behind her back, forcing her to assign his saber to her left. "All those skirmishes on Jakku." His breath warmed the shell of her ear and brought out a pink flush. She couldn't help but hear him like this. "Did you always taunt your opponents the way you do me?"

"And is this really how you choose to seek release?" She turned into him, and Kylo's breath hitched between his teeth. His eyes dropped, too late, to see the girl's sleight of hand. The activated blade plunged impossibly into the floor of the practice room. _Release_ came when Rey wrenched in his hold. There was a tear of fabric as her wrappings unraveled, and arms never before bared came uncovered. Empty gauze fluttered in his fingers as she pulled away from him. He cast it aside without a thought.

A back-handed sweep brought the lightsaber up as Rey whirled to face him. There was a sizzle of rent fabric, and smoke filled his nostrils with the next startled intake. Kylo lunged backward out of the saber's reach; while the blade wasn't powered high enough to draw blood or leave a scar, it would still bequeath an angry red burn, and one he didn't like the thought of having to explain later should anyone catch him in a state of—

Undress. He had managed to avoid direct contact with his skin, but Rey had opened his shirt, lancing it from hem-to-collar with a fierce precision. It blew around his chest in the wind of her swift maneuver; his left sleeve slipped down the hill of one sloped, pale shoulder to gather around his elbow.

Kylo stood for a long moment. Then, he shrugged one arm out of the ruined shirt. Her staff traded hands, and he rolled his other shoulder, shedding the ruined fabric and letting it fall carelessly to the floor.

It might be an advantage. Kylo knew how seeing him partially disrobed had subverted Rey's concentration in the past. He had attributed her distraction then to the disclosure of his scars, and to the peculiarly sheltered aspects of her upbringing. She had seen so much, and yet so little, of the galaxy. Perhaps she had expected something grotesque; inhuman; as she had the first time he removed his helmet.

"You're not making it easy," he commented. "To keep our secret."

_Our secret._ A current coursed through him that had nothing to do with the Force.

"You're not exactly subtle yourself." Rey wouldn't look at him suddenly, and her averted gaze amused him. His blade burned out, and she preoccupied herself with clipping the lightsaber into her belt; Kylo interpreted the gesture as a call to a draw. He didn't dispute it. He didn't dispute it, either, when the girl squared her shoulders and approached him. She raised a lithe hand, arrested it midflight, then allowed it to hover along the unfamiliar terrain of muscles. Her fingertips skated less than an inch from his bare chest, so close he could feel their passage as if she touched him. Her eyes roamed actively, never settling on any one feature for long. Kylo watched her, gaze hooded; if he drank her in similarly, it was a draught he didn't intend to extinguish any time soon. He was aware that she was looking at his scars, likely examining them up close for the first time.

He allowed the interlude. He was not self-conscious, but found himself curious about the conclusions she drew. What she thought. He left her mind untouched, knowing it would have likely been a wasted exertion to try and probe her on the subject—and desperately wishing, more now than ever before, that he still had the power to freely do so. To think that a fallen knight—one who had chased a star map across a galaxy—would one day find himself yearning to know the secret impressions of a girl was ludicrous.

Rey brushed her hair aside, and it was a moment before Kylo realized he had not reached forward to act on the impulse himself.

"Maybe," he replied eventually, on the subject of subtlety. "But I never claimed to be no one."

Many of her conversations with Luke were no longer secret to him; not after their hands brushed, and some not even before that. Rey, adrift and frustrated, had confided many of her disappointments in him almost despite herself.

"Are you all right?" she asked eventually.

He didn't deign to answer. He allowed his other scars to speak for him. He could tolerate pain; in battle, he sought it out, aggravating his own wounds to power the dark engine that drove him.

But Rey evidently didn't require his answer to take matters into her own hands. Kylo watched as the girl started to unwrap her left sunsleeve; when the ribboned fabric fell away, he saw the still-livid Praetorian brand that blemished her own skin. The revelation sent a shockwave of fury rippling through him. It was the same fury that had welled up within as he watched Snoke bat her abound the throne room like a clipped bird caught between a predator's claws. He caught her injured arm and raised it between them with thoughtless license before she could continue any of her intended ministrations. He turned his gaze into it.

"Why hasn't the Resistance healed you?" He knew why. The fleet's medical ship had been destroyed on General Hux's orders. Kylo hadn't even blinked as he watched it fragment into glittering space dust. His grip on her tightened infinitesimally, almost as if he thought the girl herself was to blame for the oversight, but he fought to keep his temper in check. His thumb grazed the raised edge of the wound. He had shed his gloves alongside his shirt.

"And yours won't heal if you don't see to it," Rey countered. "Here."

He had to wonder if she employed the deflection to redirect his hand; she trembled at his touch, a vibration not altogether subdued. His fingers fell reluctantly away from her arm, and opened almost against his will. It was an only-human reflex; what one outstretched hand offered, the other accepted. Rey was drizzling the long bandage before he could rethink the move. He closed over it in a fist before it could spill through his fingers and escape his grasp.

"Another one for the collection." His deep voice sounded almost amused. "You wasted no time adding your fair share."

He did not regret this recent burn, in the same way that he did not regret the long scar Rey had carved across his face. What had once served as constant, unavoidable reminder of his own weakness, he had almost redefined now as a memento. Sometimes, lying sleepless late at night, he pressed hard fingers to it. He could almost make it burn with the memory of her.

He wondered if Rey suspected. Or maybe the girl just knew. He wondered, too, if there was anything about _him_ that she clung to, when those in the Resistance inevitably disappointed her with their limited understanding.

Kylo's deafness to his physical world, and the uncanny tinnitus that accompanied their minds meeting, suddenly ceased. His hand seized around the unraveled fabric, too late and in vain, as everything snapped into sharp focus and Rey vanished. It was cruel that she should leave so much evidence of herself behind her: the torn shirt, the gifted ribbon, the tingling kiss of his blade.

_His blade._

The girl, and his lightsaber, were gone.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: It's opening night! SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE SPORTS FANS!_

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**II**

The torn shirt, the superficial stripe of a wound, and even the girl's clunky durasteel staff, had all been minor inconveniences compared to the fact that she had unintentionally disarmed him by whisking his lightsaber with her to the unknown reaches of the Galaxy.

_Unintentionally… or had it been intentional?_ A treacherous whisper, and like venom in the vein, one he couldn't completely inoculate himself against. They were still enemies, even if they had long since blurred all defined lines and prescribed definitions of the word.

If he felt panic at being without his weapon, the symbol of his authority, Kylo did not let it show. He had other weapons at his disposal. He paced the flat black halls of the General's ship without the familiar hilt strapped to his side, and no one questioned its mysterious absence from his person. If Hux's eyes fell to Kylo's belt more than once, and glowed with an almost colorless deliberation, the general did not act on the traitorous thoughts that slipped along the lobes of his brain like itch mites. His mind had been infested with them for a long time.

Now, Kylo stood on the bridge alongside the General, posture rigid, gloved hands clasped loosely behind his back, listening to an underling inform Hux that one of their operatives, a pilot, had somehow managed to bungle his way into the Resistance's clutches. Two spots of hard color had bloomed in the General's sallow cheeks.

There was no real chance for Kylo to relish the General's public embarrassment before the legion, though. The lax tether that existed within him now suddenly snapped with tension, as if someone faraway had Forcefully pulled on the other end of it.

Rey.

It took Kylo a moment to understand this surprise development. When the girl's confliction solidified, and the lost operative's lesser mind came into focus, he drew his own conclusion as to her intentions. Consciously or not, she was reaching out to the Force—to _him—_for guidance on how to proceed with an interrogation. The First Order pilot was not cooperating with more conventional means of persuasion, and the moralists inside the Resistance had evidently refused torture. So they turned to Rey to exact what they wanted.

_No, we can't stop now! _Kylo heard the distant demand echo, and recognized the voice of the X-Wing pilot. _We've got to keep going!_

_Interesting._ Even though she had retreated from her vision, Kylo's silent voice drifted to her. There was no easily closing this connection now that she had Forced it open (and that, in itself, required further study at a later time). Now that he had a direct path to the hostage—and to her—the Supreme Leader was keen to keep it navigable. _Dameron would have you raze this man's mind, having barely survived the procedure himself._

Kylo had known it was only a matter of time before the Resistance sought to harness their pet Jedi as a weapon. He let the fulfillment of his own derisive prediction slide between them for Rey to now interpret. It was just as he had described to her in the throne room. The First Order, the Resistance… swap the uniforms, the resources, and they were nearly interchangeable. Small-minded and brutish, and always one emergency away from complete behavioral regress. Always just one captured prisoner away from hypocrisy.

Kylo caught the shape of a faint, whispered question. Ghostly vapors haunted Rey's landscape, insinuating the suggestion of more voices.

_Rey, what did you see? _Poe Dameron's insistent plea wheedled her. He had, no doubt, taken charge of the interrogation—but he couldn't draw out the information he sought without Rey's ability to rifle through another's mental landscape.

_Tell them,_ Kylo goaded. _But you won't reveal me, will you? Maybe you should tell Dameron what I saw that time instead: a man of his supposed fortitude, crippled beyond recognition. Eyes and nose streaming. The General's favorite would have been on the floor in the fetal position within minutes of meeting me if he hadn't—_

There was a ripple suddenly; a waver coming from Ren.

He had sensed his mother in the room.

"... Supreme Leader?" The insinuation of a high, reedy voice. Not a voice of command, but it belonged to the uniformed weakling who assumed it anyway. _Supreme Leader,_ on Armitage Hux's lips, was a sneering parody of the most significant title in the galaxy. Kylo's dark eyes tracked sideways. Hux did not shrink beneath the look, even though he had every reason to be wary of it. "What is your directive?"

"I leave this in your capable hands, General." And then, for the sake of those curious ears straining to listen on the bridge: "Don't disappoint me."

The dismissal came easily, and Kylo swept from the room; all the while, he was being pulled in two. A familiar feeling. Two windows into the same reality were flung wide open, and Kylo was forced to straddle them without betraying so much as an inkling of what was happening to him. It was the same for Rey. She made her excuses and left the interrogation chamber; in fact, it was she who led him now as if he on _her _tether, to a secure location where they might confer more privately. Undistracted.

This connection between them was dangerous. The girl had reached for insight, for knowledge, that would have aided the Resistance in undermining the efforts of the Order. Their bond had begun life as a curiosity; germinated into a fragile connection, repeatedly broken and reforged; now, it was a hazardous secret he guarded out of necessity, but also one he guarded jealously. Rey was _his._ The thought didn't require further unpacking, not now, with unknown star systems between them. She might be his to dissuade from the Light; his to destroy; his to...

_Ben._

But every time she used his given name, the tables turned, and for a moment in time he was hers. The banished part of him, unacknowledged by all save one other, rose as if summoned, and he was forced to murder _Ben Solo_ all over again. He couldn't let _that_ man—his father's son—stir to meet Rey.

The man who met her in the back hallways of their split reality, the stripped creature in the mask, stared wordlessly. She looked so solid before him, so _real._ He could almost revisit that moment, suspended in time, as they rose together in the lift to meet their destiny. He should have done things differently, then. He should have found a way to keep hold of what he had. A failing. Kylo thought about the girl's ribbon tucked inside a pocket of his vest. Practically daring fate to reveal him with a single slip-up.

"Would you have probed that man's mind?" His voice rumbled aloud as he pulled them into real conversation. "Will you still?"

The time when he would have found the thought of her using her powers in such a way encouraging seemed to belong to a far-flung past. The Darkness stirred in him, whispering that this was his chance to push for seduction. Draw her in. Instead, Kylo drew close, and braced an arm against the wall beside her head. He couldn't banish the memory of their last encounter any more than she could; he couldn't keep his distance from her even if he wanted to.

"If I gave you the knowledge you seek, would you be able to pay the price?"

"Is that what you would become?" Rey's demand was no less whispered. "A traitor?"

"Not a traitor," he replied. "I have no loyalty to these people." He regarded her a long moment, and if her surprise at his words registered on her face, it did not on his. "But I am willing to make a trade," he consented.

A moment's deliberation, then Rey jutted her chin determinedly. Her eyes flashed. "On what terms?"

Kylo, surprised the girl rose to his bait, continued to study her. This time, the distraction of his mother didn't succeed in interrupting him immediately; he honed his mind, training his focus solely on the girl who had once been a mere scavenger in his estimation. How far they had both come since then. Now, she was pinned like prey beneath him, but stood as resolute as the equal she knew herself to be. A pillar of the Light.

_Rey._

His mother again. The General was insistent. Kylo wondered what she thought of Dameron's tactics, truly, and if she would really sacrifice that self-defined moral high ground for a shot across the First Order bow. Even now, he sensed the woman's bone weariness. She had never healed from her time spent lifeless in the void. She had drawn on latent Force abilities she had never properly trained to harness. Here, Luke had failed the potential of his own blood yet again.

But thoughts of the General receded as he looked at Rey. "The price you would pay…" Kylo's throat bobbed at her eye level, and he paused. The shape of the thought was there, but he didn't know how to express it now. The cost, as he had first calculated it, would be Rey sinking from that vaunted place of goodness she inhabited in the minds of those she surrounded herself with. They would learn to fear her, and her own fear of what lived within might compound once she truly began to push her limits.

But Kylo knew her better than Luke. Rey's curiosity was boundless. The strictures of the Jedi Code would only limit her understanding, as it had his. And right now, the dare promised by her eyes made him want to dare in turn. Suddenly, they were trading thrusts without the instinct to parry and guard.

_A kiss._

The thought formed like a planet-shaking thunder clap against his will and passed between them just as apocalyptically. Kylo knew she heard him; understood; saw the image of her own surrender as it manifested in his mind. Could he exact it from her? No. He could still deny it was what he wanted.

Because it was what _Ben_ wanted.

"Your location." His voice quickly overrode the previous unspoken price tag. But now that it was out there, he knew it could not be taken back. He wasn't sure he wanted it to be.

Let the girl pick her poison.

He felt Rey's confliction rise like a heady wave that broke against him, but he held strong. He wasn't conscious of leaning in further, but there was gravity between them that pulled him, inch by inch. Until her lips parted and she spoke, Kylo had no idea which of his ultimatums she might choose. Both were impossible; either was requisite.

"My location," she said. "But I won't give _them_ to you."

"They are not who I want." He pressed in. "They are not what I want given to me."

"Promise you won't hurt them," she insisted. "Give me your word, and I'll tell you where you'll be able to find me.

"You have my word." His reply was insant; he breathed it almost before she finished speaking her own terms. Kylo's eyes leapt between hers, unable to capture the full brunt of her gaze when they stood so close, and unwilling to give up the attempt. "Rey." The punctuation of her name seemed to add weight to his promise. Would she believe him? Had he put any thought at all into his vow? It was the first step in her capture, he knew. His word given today, with a sincerity that she would feel behind it, might be easily dismissed tomorrow when the factors that bound him to it inevitably changed.

She had to know his motive. She had to know that he had not, _would_ not, give up his pursuit of her, even if it meant tracking her to the blackest, starless ends of the galaxy. Despite the setback in the throne room—and the many setbacks since—Kylo still felt as assured in his vision of turning her as Rey was of her own premonitions.

Light would not win. Not this time. It was a weakness within him, and weakness within the unseen seams of the universe. It would tear them all apart unless it was banked—the same way it had torn apart his grandfather.

_You have my word. Rey._

_You have more than that._

He sensed his mother's approach. She worried about the girl; worried about what _they_ were asking her to do. Self-inflicted wounds. Kylo would not cede the moment to his weakened enemy. He leaned in further. The Devil, once called, would not be banished to just a shoulder. His mother might very well discover them now as his uncle had, but he would not give Rey up. Not yet.

"Show me."

A sweetly shuddered breath swept over him, and then… cascading visions. Bronze structures choking out a cobalt sky. Boots striding across vents. Tower cranes overhanging crowded squares like passive beasts awaiting deployment. What Rey showed him she had never seen it herself, and her unfamiliarity bled through in the detail of some of images that passed between them. She had conjured a picture of the planet from his father's telling of it; there was an almost uncomfortable _déjà vu_ as Kylo watched her impressions unfold behind his eyes. Ben had also once hung off Han Solo's every word—words that were inevitably revealed to be embellishment and lie.

"Taris." He let his recognition of it be known. "A junk world. You think you press an advantage." But his voice was soft. If there was a tremor beneath it, the depth of his tone disguised it.

_Press. _The press of her fingertips, and the warmth of her palm as it slipped against his left cheek. A slight tilt, and Kylo turned his face into them; it was weakness, instinct, and the fingers were gone again, perhaps before she could even register his momentary submission. Her hand found his heartbeat, and he wanted to whisk it away; repel and twist her wrist at vicious angle, like she was an opponent; prevent her from feeling the truth of a rhythm out of his control. Instead, his gloved hand hesitantly slid over it, and enclosed it beneath his. He enforced her commitment to touch him. In that moment, she had chosen the monster.

He let his dark knowledge flood her in a wash. The current carried them both, momentarily filling them with a shared sensation of endless night, iniquity… and the promise of unfathomable power. The limits of Rey's mind no longer ended with her individualism from others, not if she didn't want them to. It was intoxicating. It was everything Kylo had ever wanted and been so long denied. As Rey's lips sought a path to his own, his head bowed to meet hers—

His mother. Rey jerked back, as if someone had wound a fist in her hair and yanked her away from him. Kylo turned, a black carrion shadow descending on its stranded prey. Leia Organa stood in the doorway, leaving heavily on her cane. The General's shocked interpretation of the scene registered in the Force; in that moment, as he had felt it in so many others, his mother was afraid of him. The familial bond, the sorrow and remorse, came second to her abject fear of _him._

Perhaps it was Leia, or Rey herself, who expelled him suddenly from that place and time. Kylo felt himself thrown into his own present so violently he nearly rocked backward on his boots. Instead, the fallen knight stayed in position leaned against the wall. Breathing.

He didn't know why he felt the need to catch his breath.

"Supreme Leader."

A sudden, belated awareness that he wasn't alone. Kylo didn't move. He only turned his head in slow acknowledgement, dark eyes staring past the crook of his elbow and a hanging lock of jet-black hair. General Hux was there, standing at parade rest. Everything about his posture was a mocking, self-satisfied insult to Kylo's authority over him.

"Is there something the matter?" The General's flat blue eyes were like deceptively shallow pools. In their depths, Kylo saw, swam the thing that intended to eat him alive.

"Prepare my ship," the Supreme Leader ordered.

Moments later, he was walking alone. The girl's coarse ribbon was in his hand. He twisted it between cruel fingers, imagining it unravel, again and again, from her slender arm. _Rey. I won't let you slip away._

Not this time.


	3. Chapter 3

.**  
**

* * *

**III**

A kiss.

An especial, excruciating agony, and one that hadn't even been exchanged. It was the thought alone that haunted him, the same way it now seemed the girl from Jakku always had. The moment the truth of her existence left the strangulated lips of that First Order inferior… had he known peace since? Had he ever, even before that?

He had. Once in an Ahch-To hovel, he had. He might have leaned in then. He might have taken their connection to its fullest potential and pushed the boundaries of what was possible between them. He might have clenched over Rey's hand, hovering so lightly in his own, and exerted the strength he was feared for… but Rey would not have feared him. Rey had stopped fearing him long ago. Maybe she would have repulsed him with a thought, banished him from her confidence, if he chose that moment to pull her in. Would it have been worth it? How might their fates have changed? Or would an acknowledgement then, in those vulnerable hours, been somehow twisted and used against him?

Kylo's fist clenched around the control yoke of his ship. His mind hadn't cleared since Snoke's manipulations. He gazed out into what he had once considered the perfect matte blackness of space, and all he could see was… _light._ Countless star streams slipping and blurring on the edges of his vision no matter how he might try to focus his attention forward. All was living silver and distraction.

He would not be seduced by it.

_A kiss._ Ben Solo's voice in his own deepened timbre. A lost boy, lost in the inarticulate promise of _Rey._ Had she sensed an opening? Had she risen to take it, not because she wanted to, but because it was her self-appointed purpose to see him fall?

He would not allow such lenience, such lapse in control, again. It would destroy him, and bring the First Order down with him in a symphony of buckling knees. It would pull apart the Galaxy.

It would undo him, just as it had undone his grandfather.

* * *

He was a foreboding figure moving among the piebald traders and whooping hawkers of Taris. He was black-clad, hood drawn, his towering height only matched by the occasional lumbering droids and Non-Humans who scattered before his purposeful trajectory. The humidity of the outpost was almost as cloying as the call-and-response of the junkers.

He was being followed. Of course he was. Even here, an intimidation factor came with a price tag, and enough of these bottom-feeding creatures were willing to split the cost. Better to deal with it now, and clear the minor irritance in the Force, so he could better hunt Rey.

Kylo's fist clenched with a creak of leather beneath his cape as he took an abrupt right and swung down an alley. Back channel dealers scattered like roaches as Kylo whirled and flung out a hand. The slapped-together droids at the head of the pack that sprang on him sailed through the air with electronic screeches, pieced apart against the rooftops, and rained down as sparking decommissioned junk.

The others came on, and he reached for his lightsaber. Found nothing. What remained was a split second to curse as an assailant lunged into his opening. It took three pairs of hands—all belonging to the same insectoid—to wrench his right wrist back. He strained against inhuman strength, and managed to hurl the creature over his shoulder with a snarl. An impact to his chest doubled him over, but it wasn't even close to enough to bring him to his knees. Darkness swirled to meet disorientation, building like a vortex within him, as his assailants descended on him like ravening boar-wolves.

"_Ben!"_

His name, resurrected, could stop him in his tracks at the worst of times. As it nearly did now.

It was the voice he had come all this way to find that cut through the maelstrom, the fury, that redoubled his pumping blood. Kylo hurled another of his attackers off and turned, seeking her through the window of an opponent's flailing arm. He caught sight of her; their eyes locked. Then she was gone again. Into the fray. Her warning, her cavalry call, might as well have been a back alley formality.

_Rey._ Not how he had expected to find her—or be found—but nothing about their acquaintance had ever been predictable. One of the thugs snatched his cape as another launched itself at him with a guttural yowl. Kylo spun away, leaving the black, billowing material empty of a body. The first of his attackers released the cowl with a contemptuous noise; the noise elongated strangely, and scrabbling, taloned claws raked at a throat that could no longer swallow, nor breath. Kylo made a claw of his own outstretched fingers, then wrenched his hand hard to the side. The levitating thug flew like a rag doll and went limp long before it hit the ground.

His attention was diverted, and he backed into a neighboring scuffle. Then he felt it: the crossguard of his lightsaber. His fingers closed around the hilt, and closed over Rey's hand, with no visual in those stolen seconds to connect them. Just feeling. A current lanced up his arm, a transfer of power, and Kylo propelled himself away from her with his rightful blade burning a red crucifix in the jungle twilight. He impaled one body in retreat, and divested another of a cybernetic arm. Unforeseen reinforcements flooded the alley now, turning what had once been an attempted mugging into a small-scale ground war.

Kylo relished it. It was a distraction from the scavenger girl flashing by him now, as quicksilver-fast as the stars that had sung outside his viewport. But when a break in the action came, and they finally stood facing one another, chests heaving, he had to be sure. Kylo stepped to her. Without awaiting invitation, a gloved hand came up to cup the flushed curve of her face. It was ungentle, almost clumsy, as if his body hadn't quite slowed to match the tempo of the moment. It wasn't a gesture for her so much as an assurance to himself. Would he know it if she was only an illusion?

Would so many lie defeated now at their feet if she was?

Then a bolt of plasma caught him in the side. Kylo rocked forward with an animal grimace of pain, then wheeled and plunged his blade into the offender's heart. The remaining Taris ruffians were dispatched easily after that. Soon, he was left with no further course of action except to disengage his lightsaber and bend laboriously, in the issuing silence, to retrieve his cape.

Of all the inopportune memories to surface, it was Dameron's voice that now came to mind:

_So who talks first? You talk first?_

Rey spared them both. "I see your collection's growing."

Kylo released a quick breath he'd had no awareness of holding. He followed her gaze down, and reacquainted himself with the blaster wound at his side. "... let me know if you care to add to it." An invitation extended without mirth. He wondered if the girl struggled as much as he did for something to say. He hoped she did. For two people so inescapably connected, he sometimes felt alone in a way that was desperately self-conscious when he was with her. He should be used to solitude by now.

He heard a huff from Rey. "I care to get out of here if you do."

He didn't reply this time; just deepened his posture in what might have been a nod of assent. He hooked a hand through the hood of his cowl and deposited it over his head and shoulders, banishing any further expression. He now favored the side that had been shot, letting his arm crook, slight and protective, over it, as they hurried away from the back alley carnage and its few stirring, groaning survivors.

He felt in no haste to return to his father's ship, where he was sure they were headed, but mastered his displeasure for now. It was sentiment that fed his aversion, an unease—that, and his recent history of amassing every available First Order weapon to try and blast it out of existence.

"It was instructional," he said in a low voice as they slipped along . "Seeing you in your element." It was the closest Rey was bound to get to any expression of gratitude. There wasn't a single doubt in Kylo's mind that he _would_ have been able to dispatch them all without her interference, but it had certainly hastened their reunion as a result.

"With the rabble, you mean."

He glanced sidelong at her, but Rey kept focused on her chosen trajectory. They reached the _Falcon _in the time it took him to bleed through his vest.

He paused before the ship as Rey engaged the boarding ramp. She ascended, and cast a glance at him when he lingered at the foot of it. It was her moment to turn back—to restate the closure of their connection, punch the panel, and banish him forever. If she did, he would turn and go the other way. They had parted under such circumstances before.

She didn't. And soon enough, he was a tall shadow darkening the hallways, stooping his shoulders to navigate the tighter corners as she led him toward the lounge. "It's even worse than I remember," he said, as he stepped near an abandoned porg nest established within an exposed set of wires. "Surely you have better ships at your disposal?"

Rey shot a narrowed look over her shoulder. "We're not exactly a fleet anymore, if you remember."

"The Resistance was never a _fleet."_ Said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, and the last word was all teeth. He should be warier of disturbing the peace between them considering he still had a hard time believing its reality. He should be cautious of creating exploitable fissures with the thoughtless, blunt force trauma of words, but he couldn't hold himself at bay. Any mention of the Resistance, any hint of admiration Rey expressed toward his mother's cause, and he wanted to bring it down like a hated Corellian freighter.

If Kylo felt a twinge of remorse for his remarks, Rey was already moving on. Literally—she left him, and he wondered if she really had so easily dismissed what he said. He felt his blood boil, not with rage, but with resentment for giving such a ready voice to his impulses… but then she returned, and some of the tension eased out of his shoulders. But not much. He stood in the center of the lounge as if there was a repulsing shield around the very furniture.

"Why did they attack you?" She had a med kit in her hands. The sight of her drawing near with it made Kylo Ren experience, for perhaps the first time in his life, the dichotomy of _fight or flight. _They both knew what she intended. The evil discoloration blooming across the bottom of his vest wasn't about to stop on its own.

And yet, the thought of _her _administering to him…

He tried to choose his words more carefully. "To take what I had. Perhaps to ransom me to whoever would own me. A mistake they have no hope of remaking now." _Because of us,_ he wanted to say. _Because of our power._ Maybe she could see it in his eyes, his admiration for how unilaterally they had dispatched their enemies. Their combined might, that too-easy extinguishing of lesser lives, was the very thing she feared acknowledging.

For him, it was easier to reflect on memories of their victory than to occupy the uncomfortable present. Rey reached up to draw his hood off, and Kylo watched her; trying to render himself remote, trying to mute his awareness of how close she stood. Her fingers glanced unkempt locks of black hair as she pushed the fabric aside.

"You've done this before," he whispered. Not a question. Maybe an attempt at conversation. He eyed the supplies she picked out and set aside; he felt a hot flare of anger that wasn't easily, or immediately, defined. Rey's knowledge of medicine hadn't come with the safety of a formal education. It had come at personal cost. All that she knew, she knew because it had been necessary to her survival at some point or other. "If you had unlocked your powers earlier, they would have never hurt you."

_If I had found you earlier._ If he had been more open to the Force, and less distracted by his own volcanic emotions, might he have sensed her out there? Might he have gotten to her first, and spared her the torment of a scavenger's life? He could have helped shape her, helped open her mind to a new way of thinking. He might have shown her how desperately she had been wronged, and helped her take her true place above those who would abandon or diminish her. He might have helped her take revenge.

But all reflections on that unlived past flew from his mind as he felt dexterous fingers shift the fabric around the blaster wound. A thick swallow, and Kylo glanced off as she exposed his charred flesh. "I don't know why you bother." His eyes rapidly searched the rafters of the _Falcon _without questing anything in particular_._ "Who knows what side we'll be on tomorrow. Healing me now will only put you at a disadvantage."

"This isn't some strategy I'm trying to employ," she returned. "Hold still."

He almost let out a disbelieving snort at that. Her voice was clear, precise as her movements, leaving little room for doubt as to her motives—for misinterpretation—but still. But still. "We both know better." A whisper pitched almost to a growl as he turned his head to watch, but she was focused on the task at hand: cleaning his wounds, when she should be dealing them herself. "There is always a strategy." _Even if we are unaware of it._ They would never break free unless they rose to the level of those who controlled them—until Rey learned to see through the manipulations of those closest to her, the same way Kylo had vanquished Snoke's hold over him.

Only now, he found himself in _her_ hands. He cursed his weakness. He cursed that it was more than just alleyway circumstance that had led directly to this moment. _How long has this scavenger held sway over you?_ The whisper curled like lingering smoke from an extinguished flame in the back of his mind. And the voice was Snoke's—or maybe Snoke had only adopted the same dark voice that always spoke to him. That doubted. Her every caress seemed suspect; her every move toward the durasteel container, and every sliver-thin implement she extracted, a play in an unseen offensive. He needed to guard against what Rey, what his _mother,_ intended by her being here.

When pain came, it brought momentary relief from his thoughts. The girl offered her shoulder, and Kylo's hand closed over it before he knew he was reaching. He was hurting her. But she weathered his strength, shared in his pain, even as she was the one to ease it. A bacta-soaked compress touched angry flesh and enveloped it in cold non-sensation. His free hand closed over the one that balmed his wound, desperate to retake control and deny any further help. She withdrew, but her hand hovered at his side, ready to return, and her shoulder was still his to stabilize himself against.

"All right then?" she whispered. He hadn't the first notion of how to respond, save by raising his eyes to meet hers. Her upturned face watched him, cautiously optimistic, wary, but without any hint of subterfuge. Just the girl in that moment, the supplanted desert flower, almost stubbornly so. The scavenger shining through the last Jedi.

He held her gaze too long. The hand on her shoulder relaxed into the curve of her neck, and remained, a presence that no longer needed steadying. Her pulse beneath his fingertips seemed to speed as the seconds lengthened. It was too much to try and register. He retracted his hand and turned away.

"Your staff isn't with me." Logistics hadn't favored its removal from his bedroom, but she would surely see it as a calculation. Kylo couldn't deny that her inconvenience was his advantage. "But you have my word I won't attack you unarmed." His eyes hunted the room for the Skywalker lightsaber. His feelings were too much of a jumble to assist him in his quest.

"I'll make another," Rey said finally. She was trying to tug him back so she could finish dressing his wound.

"I know you will."

"But I was rather fond of _that_ one."

"The Jedi can't form attachments."

"And apparently a _Sith _can't hold still!" Rey vented her exasperation. She was getting better at suppressing her own temper; which, to him, made it all the more rewarding when she lost it.

But the Supreme Leader submitted to the authoritative rise in the scavenger's tone now without a second thought. Kylo held; his body might have vibrated from the effort, from the tension of muscle and complete suppression of nervous energy, but he exercised control. He felt, infuriatingly, like a child. It was why he kept returning to the familiar language of conflict and warfare: so he could keep reminding them both of who they were outside the no man's land of a dead man's ship.

The sweeping emotional tide of Rey's thoughts, then—her unrestrained musings on a fate recently averted, and one that Kylo felt certain would have never come to pass, not in an alleyway on _Taris_—crowded the air of the _Falcon_. Her concern for his welfare were such a complete shift from what her feelings had once been that it was almost overwhelming. There was too much to unpack in her sentiment, too much he had once craved and chained himself away from yearning for ever again.

"Your emotions still govern you," he noted. It was a quiet acknowledgement, as if the privacy they now shared wasn't enough on its own; as if the whole universe was an oppressive ear straining to listen in. "It would have gotten you into trouble back at the Academy." But the observation was softened, just slightly. No chance to criticize the Jedi ever went untaken, but some of the fight unnecessary to the moment seemed to ebb out of him. His aggression wasn't sustainable, not even for the volatile Kylo Ren. Not when his enemy healed his wounds. "Our bond also. Have you thought about it?" He turned his head. She had finished, and he released the hem of his shirt. He watched as Rey drew up a bench to sit. After a pause, he lowered himself down on the seat across from her; it took some effort. He rested his palms on his knees, digging in, just a little, to anchor himself in the moment. The girl's unwavering gaze, when given, had a habit of carrying him to far-flung places. Perhaps he was just used to communicating with her across literal vast distances. "The Jedi you seek to emulate spurned all attachment. Surely Luke told you that much before he faded away for good."

It was skirting delusion to think Skywalker had departed without leaving an imprint. But Kylo didn't want to think about it. He didn't want Rey to think about it, either.

"What were _you _taught at the Academy?" She parried his question with one of her own, and he allowed her to run from him. For now.

"Nothing of use." He pulled back slightly; his hands glided over the material of his pants, back straightening, and it was only then he realized he had been leaning forward at all. "The foundations, maybe." He could give her that much: the truth. It was all he had ever given her. In the troubled days that spanned between them, he had never twisted information. He had never once lied to her.

"Master Skywalker preferred not to talk about the past," she replied, eyes drifting. Still chasing ghosts. "But he spoke to me of… balance." His awareness of her hands, pinned between her knees, was all-consuming. "Neutrality. Of when to listen to what you feel, and when to abstain."

"And what did Luke say to you? About abstaining?" Something like a smile, and something like the dark half of a death-dealing moon, twisted his lips. "Not the same things he said to me." He let the implication linger between them, unaddressed and undefined beyond the sudden charge in the air. Something in his eyes almost seemed to spark with laughter, but was it at her expense? "The Jedi have always cherry-picked where and _how_ to intervene in the affairs of others. As for affairs…" He raised one expansive shoulder in a half-shrug. His grandfather's tragedy before he assumed Vader's helm was notorious. "Would you have accepted that path, knowing what was required of you? Or will you still?" His voice dropped. He leaned toward her, almost coiled to spring. "The very thing that drove you from that junk planet—that pursuit—they would have asked you to give it up. Your parents. Another's touch."

A memory, the brush and slide of bare fingertips, pulsed within him. Kylo drew back, a second retreat, and corrected his posture to what it had been to cover for himself. He felt too big for the _Falcon's_ salon, and wondered if he looked it. "But maybe this is beyond the scope of your understanding." His eyes gleamed like flint weaponized to a new purpose. "You can't have known much of others stranded on _Jakku."_ He had seen enough of her life in stolen snapshots to know how abysmally lonely it was.

But then, so had she, his.

Rey bridled. "What I grasp now, better than I ever did, is how every being is complex. Including you." _Especially you _might as well have been the conclusion for how loudly she telegraphed her opinion.

"People are less complicated than you give them credit for," he dismissed. He had seen into enough minds, tasted enough ambitions, to feel absolutely confirmed in this. Even Han Solo had proven utterly simplistic: an infamous, empty jacket, with a blaster perpetually half-cocked. The smuggler had proved completely unequal to the task of being a father, or of being a reliable partner to his mother. The General was another story, so cold and remote she may as well have occupied an orbit in the Hoth system. At least from Leia, Kylo had learned the value of stoicism early. He had learned to see himself through his mother's eyes; to accept, and even appreciate, the mantle of _monster._

He watched Rey's hand travel to the slope of her own shoulder and grip it suddenly, fiercely. Reasserting the pressure he had taken back when he withdrew his touch? Her every move enthralled him. He was coming to know her tics, her habits, but there was always some small variation, some new anomaly, to add to his mental map of her. In the face of his own claims, she was _completely_ unpredictable to him.

"But you…" He watched his hand slide over the one that remained in her lap, engulfing without seizing. "What is it about you?" A pleading, rhetorical question, voiced and left to hover in the haunted air between them. "I can't stop thinking about you," he whispered. He needed to pin his tongue with his teeth. Now. He needed to keep his own counsel. He overturned Rey's hand, and his thumb stroked the pulse point in her wrist. He marveled at how fragile, how almost glass-translucent and vulnerable, that skin was.

"The more I look at you, the more I realize you are what I was warned against." By Snoke. By Luke. She was diverting him from the path he had chosen and obstructing his destiny at every turn. The longer they maintained this connection, the more fate's ever-clear lines blurred, and the closer ultimate conflict crept.

"We'll destroy each other."

Kylo bent his head to her captured hand. Warm lips skated across bare knuckles. He was lost in the moment, flush with sudden heat, unable to align what he was saying with what he was doing.

"We won't." She beseeched him, eyes brimming and earnest. "Ben—"

She had defied him from the beginning, and she defied him now, countering his claim with a degree of certainty too often truly absent in everything he said and did. He knew how to project, but his arrogance was always undermined, deep down, always vulnerable to the slightest dissent. As always, Rey rose up to meet him; to negate, and then equalize. He could hear her breathing, quick and labored, as his lips lingered on the ridges of her fist. How many times had it flown toward him at velocity? His kiss tamed it now. That he could render her as powerless as she did him seemed unthinkable. It was _weakness,_ his alone to bear, as he had borne everything else…

A touch on his shoulder, and he surfaced from his agony. Their fingers threaded, and then Rey's lips—soft, surprisingly yielding—melded with his own.

And his desire for her, that mounting passion he denied with decreasing success, overwhelmed him then. The hand not clenched with hers found the curve of her waist and slid to the muscular indent of her back; the possessive press of flared fingers spanned the breadth of her, almost big enough to hold her in his palm. In one fluid move, Kylo pulled her to him, welcoming her lithe body astride one knee and into his lap. Their kiss deepened as the firm press of mouths hardened, and they broke against one another's remaining defenses; she ensnared his lower lip between hers as light seemed to fill him beyond his capacity to hold it.

_Rey._

"Rey." Her name a helpless utterance. Heavy eyes slid open momentarily before closing again. The hand on her back curled up her spine, until a steel band of forearm sealed her tightly to him. Closer than he had ever allowed another, and not close enough. She opened her mouth, perhaps to reply, and Kylo slid his tongue in to taste what had so long been forbidden.

If he was stronger in the Force, he might have seen this coming. How such a collision could escape his notice seemed to defy every shade of every rule ever taught to him on either side of the eternal conflict. All his life he had heard that he was powerful beyond measure—intuitive in ways others were not or could not comprehend. In recent days all matters _Rey_, past and future, had seemed accessible to him. He could see now that it had been folly to assume so… or he would have, if he could see anything at all but _the girl._

He was on fire everywhere she touched him. The feline undulations of her body left him reeling, insensible but not insensate—caught between wanting to forestall her long enough to catch his breath, and needing to urge her on. His fingertips stroked the fringe of her hair between her bunching shoulders as his tongue plunged past her teeth, pursuing battle on a front where none remained victorious for long. His lips fought for mastery over hers, even as the velvet paradise of Rey's gasping, near-to-protesting mouth encased and enslaved his every sense. Suddenly he knew what it was to burn. Even the forge of Mustafar, where his grandfather had made his _first_ fated last stand, could not compare to his own immolation at Rey's hands now.

_Ben._ His given name a mantra in her head, summoning all that he had vowed to leave behind. An adolescent's suppressed curiosity awoke now as a man's unrestrained desire for the girl straddling his lap. When she wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a gridlock, Kylo shifted up beneath her, and almost came out of the _Falcon's_ seat in his effort to close the distance. A strained utterance from her, and he swallowed it on a gasp. He could feel himself swelling at the junction between Rey's thighs as she clamped down and rode his thrust. The hand not plastered between her shoulder blades descended, flaring along her waist, forcing its femininity into recognition, before grabbing a fistful of flank as he ground his pelvis into her. Their Force connection was suddenly full of shades, outlined by Light, coming together in Darkness: a man and a woman locked in shuddering bliss, every dark dream he had ever had of them together laid bare.

Kylo felt the spark of teeth, and he was lost to everything. His hand shot back up, delving beneath her gray sash, twisted, and _yanked_ the layers down her shoulder, exposing her to the hill of her left breast. He pulled away to taste the salt from the skin where neck and shoulder met; his teeth grazed her pulse point before his mouth suppressed it, taking any brief pain he inflicted and soothing it immediately with wet heat. His lips climbed her neck as his palm smoothed up her ribs and cupped her chest just above her racing heart. Every inch of her seemed to coil and tighten as he grew: tension, and the means to overcome it

Nimble fingers skated along the front of his shirt, never shy in their purpose. His own fingers followed Rey's lead, thoughtless, before they were called away. He raised his arms and shrugged powerful shoulders to aid in the removal of his shirt. He lost track of it, flung somewhere into the _Falcon._ He didn't think about it again.

Then she pressed a kiss to the long, angry slash of his scar, and Kylo shuddered, deeper than any inadvertent shiver that might have coursed through him when their activities aggravated his latest wound. It seemed impossible that the girl who had forever changed the makeup of his face would now grace it with her lips. She kissed him as if she could take it back, or heal him. He understood, then, that it was not ugliness she saw, had never been ugliness. As her lips moved down he caught them with his own, arresting their descent, before letting them go again. His brows knit until it looked as if he ached with aching. He seized her wrist and pulled her in close against his chest. How he wanted to tear her clothes, to free her from restraint, to feel the silk of her skin against the warzone of his.

Rey's forehead dropped into his shoulder. "Kriff." Her curse came on a hot gust along the base of his throat. Kylo's hands didn't hover as hers did; they gripped, his thumbs hooked into the seams where thigh met hip. He ached to push into her again, to feel that desperate, forbidden friction, but held still.

"What is it?" A whisper he barely recognized as his own. His eyes fluttered, and his mouth found the curve of her ear. _Give in,_ the dark order resonated within, wanting to assume his own voice, to lead Rey further to astray. _Surrender to me._ Maybe she could hear it, rising up inside him. _And I'll surrender to you._

"Are you afraid?" He nosed her face back to his, until they shared the same breath, gazing openly into each other's eyes. Somehow, this felt more intimate than anything to come before. His lips, flushed from kissing her, parted; Kylo Ren's words drawn from an old script, a practiced one, but it was Ben staring out of his eyes.

"No." A hushed denial. "Are you?"

"You're trembling." His counter to her throwing his question back at him, because his own answer was one he was unprepared to acknowledge the truth of. Her eyes, as they bore into him, made him want to dodge around their signal—he, the Supreme Leader, ostensibly incapable of fear or retreat. The girl in his lap _(the girl)_ was still his adversary and his salvation, both in congress, existing impossibly in the circle of arms that were _his_. She was unflinching in the grasp of the monster who—now that he had finally caught his prey—had absolutely no idea what to do with her.

A lie. He may not know what to make of Rey every other time they met, but his instincts surged with the revelation of her astride him. They could break for a stunted, breathless attempt at conversation, but his body was quick to override any long contemplation of how they had arrived here; he yearned for her, an unerring, all-over ache, that had always lurked like a fever unseen beneath his skin. There was no hiding it from her any longer, nor was there any denying it to himself. He was falling, the same way his grandfather had fallen, and for once the thought didn't drive him into the arms of rage and despair. It was Rey's arms that received him, and his own that refused to let her go.

She sealed those unbearably soft lips against his once more, and warmth bloomed anew, alien, incredible. His arms constricted around her waist in clear resolution. The wound on his side flared awake, and he failed to master the twinge in time. Ignoring the pain, and channeling its power over him to further his own strength as he gathered Rey to him, would have secured her continued touches; her gasping lips; her every pliant curve beneath—

"We can't do this." The girl's unlikely accent suddenly cut through the mist he had lost himself in. "Ben. You're bleeding again."

"Leave it," he growled in frustration. "Rey." But she was already pulling back, brows knitting with concern at what she saw on her hand. He wanted to snatch that hand back and replace it where it belonged.

"I can't leave it," she protested. "And I used the last of the bandages already." She attempted to make her voice a scold, but the pair of dark eyes watching her could subsume stars. Aware of her precarious position, Rey extracted herself quickly, slipping free of his arms and rearranging her clothes. Every inch of skin he had worked for seemed to vanish before his eyes. "I'm going out to find supplies. Fresh ones. You wait here."

It took all his restraint, summoned from reserves he had never imagined, not to grab the girl and pull her protesting back in against the needful rigidity of his body. Every inch of him wanted to overpower and possess what was never meant to be his.

But what was never meant to be his left him there, head spinning and desperately hard. Alone, Kylo vented another growl, and (after pacing the salon for untold minutes) sat down heavily, once more favoring his side and the fresh bandages the former scavanger always seemed to be in excess of—_except_ for when it suited him most for her to stay exactly where she was.

He sprang up again in the next instant as a ringing cry of indignation echoed through the Force.

_Rey._

Something was wrong.

Every hair on his body stood on end as a tide of alarm, only half his own, swept over him. While he had resigned himself to moping in the _Falcon's_ deteriorating salon, the treacherous markets of Taris had just swallowed the girl whole.

He summoned his clothes to him like a flock of crows and departed with all speed.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: A shorter update to be sure, but a welcome one.

* * *

**IV  
**

There weren't enough kriffs in the Galaxy to express the trouble she was in, but that certainly didn't stop Rey from trying. The young Jedi cursed again and again as she strode back toward civilization, or what passed for it on Taris. Her gait was not quite a stroll nor a sprint, but occupied some dreadfully uncomfortable in-between. The further she removed herself from the scene of the crime, it was all she could do to keep from breaking into a run.

Her cheeks hadn't flamed this hot for this long since she had windburn on Jakku to contend with, and the all-over flush refused fade. If anything, thinking of what—of _who—_had triggered it in the first place only made things worse.

She had kissed him. Ben.

_More _than kissed him.

She was practically cooking herself beneath her hood, but didn't dare risk drawing it back. Instead, she ground her teeth and shook her head to dispel the memory. Lighting out for supplies was a poor excuse and they both knew it, but she was expert at turning flimsy things to her purpose. So she stole back into the night markets of Taris, a moon-white phantom, allowing herself to be seen but not too seen. The occasional Humanoid leer was enough to assure her that she had not been marked as anything more than a novice trader to be taken advantage of. It she didn't stray from the stalls of the professional exploiters, she had every hope of coming away only minimally robbed, as opposed to marginally murdered.

It was easier to think of Ben as a patient than to dwell on how she had almost let herself be carried away by him. He had carried her off once before, on Takodana. She had woken on Starkiller with an unshakeable conviction that—should she survive the events that followed—it never be allowed to happen again.

_"Rey."_ It was Leia's voice that came to her, rather than an old lecture of Luke's. The young Jedi was navigating the swampy resettlement as much as she was back on Ajan Kloss, what remained of her twin mentors a small yet formidable figure draped in dusty purple. The two women had found themselves alone together right before Rey left—_after _she had been caught courting their enemy in the hallway.

She felt no pride in the memory. Her back had been turned, and she had thought of nothing to say to her master. And so she had said nothing. If she could have become nothing, she would have.

But they were well beyond that now.

_"Mind telling me what happened back there?" _Every line of Leia's face had been etched with a concern that only deepened as Rey turned to her.

_"I'm sorry, Master. I'm just… tired." _The excuse was weak. They were all tired. She made another attempt. _"I wasn't… it didn't feel right to reach inside that pilot's head. Not the way Poe wanted. We'll get the information, I just—"_

_"You know that's not what I meant."_

Of course she had known. She didn't have to be Force-sensitive to understand the vision of the woman's son looming over her was one Leia would have looming over her still. Rey had clutched her satchel, unable to focus on packing amid a sudden upswell of emotion. She knew unquestioningly what she was about to do—she knew what she was about to attempt—but that didn't allay her desperation or guilt. Wherever she was, whatever she did, she was betraying them. Her own abilities were a two-way bridge straight to the First Order.

_"You let him in, Rey."_

_"Snoke let him in!"_ Rey burst out. Ashamed of herself, she whirled away. _"Don't you think I've tried everything to keep him out?"_ A lie. In the last few days she had called to him. _Welcomed _him. The relief she felt at giving in had bordered on intoxicating.

_"Rey."_ Leia's tone then had been unexpectedly gentle. "_Don't you think if he reached out to _me,_ I would have answered him?"_

A long silence stretched between them. It was somehow worse than any expected disciplinary action, and Rey couldn't bear it. _"I'm a security risk," _she had heard herself argue bitterly._ "But I won't let myself become a liability to those I love. Just… before you say anything to the others, let me fix this on my own. Please."_

_"I won't ask where you're going." _The General's hands had entered her swimming vision to take hold of her own, and Rey ceased strangling the strap of her bag._"All I ask is that you come home _safe."

Back in the present, on Taris, Rey shook herself free. She _would _return, just as soon as she made a deal with Ben. If they couldn't sever the link permanently, they needed to establish rules. There could be no more trading information the way they had before. She had to get him to agree—somehow—to giving up the First Order's best tactical asset. _Her._

A club swung down out of the crowd and struck her unforgivingly. The bodies around her barely parted as she fell.

* * *

. . . .

* * *

Rey stirred, and when she opened her eyes, someone was waiting to split her skull open all over again.

_Where are you?_ The sharp question was a shaft penetrating the fog, before the fog seemed to reverse on itself and pull it back in. Rey gasped, and fought back nausea. She might have been sick if she knew which way was up. But the words came again, insistent as a beacon guiding her to consciousness. _Where are you? _She realized it was the voice that had roused her.

Ben.

"Something's wrong." Her voice wobbled. "Ben, I can't…" She screwed up her eyes in an attempt to slow the world on its fast-spinning axis.

_You have a concussion,_ he said after a long pause.

"I know. I've had them before."

_That's why you can't summon the Force to you._

"Are you underwater?" she wondered.

"Rey. Focus."

His voice solidified around the word. She grit her teeth and blinked hard, once, trying to force further clarity. But the Force would not clarify. She huffed her hair out of her eyes, and realized it had come loose. Had they dragged her by it? Maybe that accounted for the more localized sting at the back of her scalp. She wouldn't wonder again. The last thing she needed was for Ben to overhear her theory and burn the planet down.

She tried to stand, bracing herself with one hand against the dirt wall of her cell. The room pitched wildly, bucking worse than anything even the _Falcon_ could serve up, and she fell sideways away from the wall. Ben lunged forward, but she slipped right through his phantom arms, catching only the anguished twist of his expression as her body spilled back onto the floor.

Maybe she was safer here. Once she collected herself, Rey reached for him again and swept an artless hand through his leg, as insubstantial to her as a hologram. "You're not here," she said, bewildered. Of course. Ben had never really been in the cell with her, but she hadn't expected an inability to make contact.

"I am with you," he said fiercely. "I'm coming for you. Tell me where you are."

"I don't know!" Her frustration, equally ferocious, was almost enough to make her head split open completely. She would prefer that to constantly feeling _pulled_ like this.

"Stop arguing and focus," Ben growled. "The more details you see the more you give to me. Right now I can't see anything."

_Concussion,_ he had guessed. He must know from experience the havoc it could wreak on a Force user. She was only barely holding up her end of their connection—that explained why they could no longer touch. Apparently it also meant he couldn't see anything without her. With an effort, Rey rolled onto her back and gazed at the ceiling. Before her eyes, it seemed to change its mind and try to reassign itself to the floor. There were bars on her right. That was the best she could manage. "Great," she mumbled. "Just what we need. Another of us injured."

"We both know that isn't why you left."

"Do we really have to have this conversation now?" Rey slapped a hand to her forehead, covering her eyes to gain some relief from the light above.

"I'm sorry. Do you have another appointment?"

"I don't want to talk about it!" she barked.

"None of this would have happened if you gave into your feelings. Feelings we both know you have." Kylo's temper was awake, molten beneath an unmoving surface. "But you insist as ever on running from it. From us."

"I came to Taris. I agreed to meet."

"You agreed to give yourself to me."

"Not… like _that!"_

"Like what?" Trailing the anger, he sounded almost amused. "Do you even know what you're referring to?"

"Do you?" she demanded archly. This conversation in particular was becoming just another dance in their repertoire. As with all their choreography, the aim was to outmaneuver the other always.

"Unseeming of a Jedi to run." To Rey, Ben's sudden avoidance of the subject was obvious. Even a full retreat would have been more discreet.

"I didn't run."

"You ran right into the arms of captors worse than me."

"There's no one worse than you," she said automatically. "And I was never _your_ captive." Rey rolled onto her stomach, then graduated to elbows. Her hair hung in her eyes as she glared up at him. "Maybe you were mine. Did you ever consider that?"

"Maybe."

She had overturned too fast, maybe, which is why her heart wasn't in its usual place when Kylo extended a hand down to her. Suddenly, with the familiar invitation so inaccessible to her, she wanted it more than air. Rey moved up onto her knees, pushed her hair from her eyes, then grasped for him. _Be with me._ She cast the thought so strongly her teeth ached. The miserable line of Kylo's mouth distorted further, and she realized he had heard her plea. Her fingers slid into the cradle of his and gripped leather. Kylo shuddered with a relief that wasn't individual only to him and pulled her to her feet. When she rocked forward, off-balance, he was there receive her.

"There she is." An unfamiliar voice sounding thick with rust interrupted. "That's the one we picked up."

No reception came. Ben was gone with what remained of her concentration, and Rey was alone inside her prison. But not without. As soon as she could be assured of her balance, she revolved to meet her captors. There were two of them, masked, and armed with club-ended staffs. She was sure her vision wasn't just seeing double, because one of the figures shifted from one side to the other while the other held itself more confidently. Human? Non-Human? She couldn't be sure. Their towering heights and hunched postures seemed to indicate the latter.

"She's been talking," the nervous one mentioned. He spoke Basic through a translator built into his insectoid visor.

"Well?" the other quipped. "Was the information relevant?"

"I mean to herself. It seemed like a, uh… lover's quarrel."

"Well, I might have hit her over the head a little hard," the other admitted, before directing what felt like a disgusted look of scrutiny her way.

"It was _not_ a lover's quarrel," Rey emphasized as she was seized by the shoulders and hauled out of her cell. She tried to take in the block as they half-dragged her to her coming reckoning. It seemed an improvised prison built inside a shallow ambrostine cellar; a few doleful prisoners watched as she was roughly escorted out. One of them, an Ardennian, scaled his bars and hollered:

"I swear I have the credits! Let me back on my ship and I'll show you!"

_A debtor's holding tank? _Why had she been picked up and deposited here?

There was commotion further up the cellar steps, laughter, and wrong-noted music. Rey was thrust into the thick of it through an identi-locked door. The stale air of the room on the other side was choked with unfamiliar, acrid smokes, and pipes of varying lengths and unusual shapes were evident in the maws of many of the gamblers. _Where am I?_ Rey wondered again as she was dragged along. This room was almost more claustrophobic than her cell had been, and something about it made her skin itch. How far underground was she? Not even the eyes set on stalks craned to follow her as she was shunted toward an unlit table in the back, and presented to a figure seated in a conspicuous pocket of darkness.

"So this is the child." The creature wore an identical carapace shuttering its real features. A grub-like hood encased its shoulders, and the rest of its body was swallowed up by vast robes streaked with filth.

"A real scrumrat," one of her escort offered.

"I'm not familiar with that one," Rey muttered as she was forced down into a chair. She kept her back stiff, but decided to go unprotesting. She needed all the time she was afforded now to gather her strength. If Ben didn't come in time—

_He will,_ Rey affirmed fiercely. And the bastards who held her better have Hell in credits, because they would be made to pay in full. Knowing the man who had once been her enemy… who was her enemy _still_ by every metric the galaxy at large cared to weigh… they would be lucky to escape with their lives. If her own life was forfeit, that luck was certain to run out.

If there was one thing Kylo Ren was good at, it was hunting for her.

"Now now." The figure at the table folded gloves with too few fingers and sat back. "She may not look it, but we're in the presence of royalty." Her interrogator did not sound especially reverential.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." She bit each word off cleanly. She even mustered the ability to look bored through her disorientation.

Her interrogator whipped forward then, fast as a serpent strike. "Games run in the family," the creature hissed. "But the galaxy has caught on now, and your hand was overplayed before you ever inherited it. My associates and I _know_ you are the pilot of the _Millennium Falcon._ The child of General Leia Organa... and heir apparent of Han Solo."


End file.
